sending a utf8 query to MySQL from LiveCode stack

[Tim Selander]

Starting to work with LC with a MySQL database on my on-rev.com 
account. Got the database, user, table etc. made and imported all 
my data using phpMyAdmin and can use the database with phpMyAdmin.

For testing purposes, I made some of the column names Japanese 
and some English. (Ideally, I would like all column names to be 
in Japanese utf8.)

Everything works fine on phpMyAdmin, that is searching for 
Japanese data using the Japanese column names works fine.

On my stack, I have a fld "query" that has
SELECT *
FROM  `tablename`
WHERE  `県` LIKE  '東京'
LIMIT 0 , 30

when I put that in a variable to send to the server, the variable 
replaces the kanji characters with "?" -- whether the kanji is in 
the column name, or in the data to search for -- and of course 
the search fails.

on mouseUp
    global vDatabaseID
    set useunicode to true
    revExecuteSQL vDatabaseID, "SET NAMES 'utf8'"

    put fld query into dbsql
    put revDataFromQuery(, , vDatabaseID, dbSQL) into myResult

    put uniencode(myResult,"UTF8") into tData
    set the unicodetext of field "queryresults" to tData
end mouseUp

<put uniencode(fld query, "UTF8") into dbsql> doesn't work either

How do I get the kanji/utf8 into a variable correctly?

Can anyone give me a pointer?

Thanks,

Tim Selander
Tokyo, Japan